Monogram Towels

by Emily on September 13, 2011

I wanted to wrap up one final project from Pip’s Birthday that I could share. Since we had only a handful of children present (mostly adult family & friends), I wanted to make something special for the little ones since I hoped that they’d be making a splash! I decided on making towels for each of them as their favor. I thought it would be something they could use in the future and hoped that they could put it to use during the party too.

I mentioned in my last post that I shopped around for towels at discount stores but then ended up having luck on a sale price at JoAnn’s and was happy with the look. I purchased 5 yards of terry cloth material and cut each towel down to 1 yard long. It made a perfect length/height for kids. Pip & Mo will still have room to grow into theirs. I went with two color options in the quilt binding on the edges in orange and green and all the initials had the same fabric swatch used.

First I picked another very block-y type font in Word and printed out giant letters. Then I attached the paper to the fabric and cut it out around the letters which acted as my stencils.

The next step was to finish up the loose, ragged edging on the fabric. This was something that I had not even thought of before going to the store and might have changed my mind about buying the terry cloth by the yard had I not known about the double fold quilt binding from my last project. This made it super easy to clean up the edges in a hurry.

I had to be very careful not to let the terry cloth slip out from the binding but it seemed to hold well on the towels.

Once the fabric letters were cut out, I attached a piece of Pellon paper which acts as an adhesive to the letters and cut out Pellon in the letter shape. The above photo shows what it looks like when you peel off the protective paper to reveal the side which will adhere to the towel.

Once the sticky side is unveiled, you iron the letter directly onto the towel making sure to hold it in place for several seconds.

The letters were pretty secure on the towels but I didn’t want any pulling up to happen during the wash so I then did a zig zag stitch around all the letters to ensure it would hold up.

And here we have it! Quick and easy monogram towels! Now let’s make a splash!